Pierre Thoretton
Dans le bois dormant
A sculptor, painter, and photographer, he has also been a producer and screenwriter, notably collaborating with Pierre Bergé. He is the author of the feature film Yves Saint Laurent – Pierre Bergé, L’amour fou, nominated for a César Award in 2011. For the past ten years, he has been developing a photographic work using a view camera. His exploration of landscapes, which began in the desert of the American West, now continues on the shores of the Mediterranean. The artist, who was born in Picardy, in the heart of the forests, has nurtured a deep fascination with the sylvan world since adolescence—a mental and emotional territory he continues to explore.
His artistic journey is magnificently documented in a medium-length film by Émilie Lacape, which shows the photographer at work in front of his subject. In a Californian landscape ravaged by fire, Pierre Thoretton forgoes capturing the violence of the fires to immortalize the grandeur of the century-old redwoods. His approach echoes that of Ansel Adams (1902-1984) and his work in Yosemite National Park.
“In the Sleeping Beauty,” the first solo exhibition devoted to this research cycle, demonstrates an approach that favors the long term, an attentive gaze, and a physical encounter with the places he explores. His images vividly capture the sensitive tensions between the appearance of forms and the experience of nature.
Pierre Thoretton questions the boundary between the real and the imaginary, the trace of time in the living, and the possibility of an inhabited perspective on the natural world. His work, informed by a keen awareness of contemporary ecological and aesthetic issues, asserts a profoundly intimate and poetic dimension.
